Kylie's Kids: Meet Travis & Hunter
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- This month at Masonic Children's Hospital, there was a special meeting between Travis Moore, who had cancer 20 years ago and Hunter, who's fighting it today.
Travis, now 30 years old and living in Florida, came back to Minnesota to see Dr. John Wagner who treated him two decades ago.
"I have very vivid memories of chemo and radiation," Travis said.
While he was visiting he also wanted to meet a current patient undergoing treatment, that's where Hunter comes in.
Hunter is 19 years old and fighting Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, the same cancer that Travis had.
Hunter was diagnosed at 12 years old and has been in and out of treatment for seven years.
"It was hard to wrap my head around when I first had it because it's something nobody wishes they had," Hunter said.
Both Hunter and Travis had years of chemotherapy and relapses and both were out of traditional treatment options, when they tried a Bone Marrow transplant.
"This was actually my last resort," Hunter said.
"You have a bond in a sense because the therapy we give to you is actually derived from a therapy we gave to him," Wagner said.
"When I first saw Dr. Wagner in passing I didn't have words," Travis said.
Travis is now living in Florida and cancer free.
"I'm thirty years old with a nice job, I have a beautiful wife," Travis said.
He's a fisheries scientist which brings him all over the world.
"Most people would look at myself and never know," Travis said. "I've done a lot of physical activities like playing sports."
That's another thing he has in common with Hunter, who's played sports through his treatment.
"I stayed pretty active through this entire thing," Hunter said. "I did baseball for the first couple year."
Travis is also one of the few people in the world who knows what Hunter is going through, and what life can look like after transplant and after cancer.
"There's hard time knows, you know it, it sucks," Travis said. "Don't let it get to you."
"There's normal out here, then there's normal for people like us," Travis said. "But there's a normal life somewhat, for us. It gives me hope and I hope it gives you hope that there's life after a transplant."
"It gives me lots of hope actually that if it worked 20 years ago that should be able to work now," Hunter said.
Hunter was supposed to start his freshman year at the University of Minnesota Rochester.
That's been delayed for this treatment, but he's hoping to be back next year to study oncology.
